Tag Archives: drowning

Today I discovered one of the nice things about having to carry my pentacle around with me. Opportunity. I had only intended to walk to the shops and back to pick up some food items, thinking I would do the evocations once I’d got back home. But I took a scenic route via the Ness Islands and happened to spot a place that would prove ideal for an evocation. I came back from the shops by the same route so that I could use it. It was raining quite heavily and I suspected there was a chance it would stop by the time I was on the way home.

It was a bench looking out into the cold black waters of the Ness, with a small concrete or stone form, about half a meter high, positioned directly between the bench and the river. I saw this as the obvious spot to place my pentacle and sat down, still in my water proofs, since though it had stopped raining, the bench was still soaked and trees were still dripping water.

I began by focusing my gaze on the pentacle, as I tend to do when summoning a spirit without a physical doll or representation. I began to appreciate how the design on my pentacle seemed to aid in creating the optical illusion of surroundings dancing and began to wonder if the creation of such an artefact would always prove an art-form, each pentacles optimal design dependent upon the intended user, or whether a scientific study would be able to discover the perfect trance inducing pentacle that would work for everyone. These were my thoughts immediately before shifting my gaze to the spirit of the river.

The first thing I asked after we greeted each other was a kind of rhetorical question, more an exclamation of surprise that the river didn’t want to drown me. “Why would I?” replied the river, “I will keep on flowing whether you drown in me or not.”

I felt relief and the next thing I asked was whether the river was a dragon. I asked this because I think of it poetically as alike unto a winding black serpentine dragon.

“Kelpies don’t want to drown people. Kelpies want to reunite people with their emotions. Only when a person becomes detached and repulsed by their own emotions do they interpret the message of a Kelpie as an invitation to drown themselves, either through careless risk or deliberate suicide.”

I choked a little at this because I remembered a time when looking into rivers had the effect of making me feel that they were inviting me to drown in them. Probably why I asked the question in the first place. I was also in an emotionally difficult place in those days.

“You don’t want to drown yourself do you. You aren’t out of touch with your emotions.”

I realised this was true. I had indeed moved on, become emotionally stronger and gained new understanding of my emotions. Gained a better vocabulary to describe them and communicate them to others so it no longer felt like a side of myself I was alone with. I understood then why I felt like the river wanted to drown me when I was younger but not now.

I realised I had a close friend that has accepted my offer of magical help, who is currently going through an emotionally difficult time, and I asked the river if it could help them. It suggested that this friend visits a river themselves and sit by it, talk to it if they can.

Finally, as I looked back to my pentacle to end the ritual, I noticed that staring into the fast flowing waters for all this time had caused my vision to go wavy. I looked back to the river and complemented it on its ability to induce trance, better even than my pentacle.

“Yes, you don’t need that here. Feel welcome to bring it, but don’t feel you need it to talk to me.”